Dead Man's Hand (23 page)

Fixing the mental picture
of all the pieces together I let the pen rest in the palm of my right hand and
poured heat through that mental image and into the pen.  In the blink of
an eye, what had been a pen was now a serviceable nine millimeter Beretta,
complete with the hopefully functional sound suppressor.  With my tool in
hand I dropped my eye back to the hole and made sure Alexis hadn’t noticed I
was there. This was going to be difficult enough without having to look him in
the eye.  Thankfully, he was still engrossed in his show.

Taking a deep breath I
leveled the gun at the back of his head.  This was it. Once I crossed this
line there would be no going back.  My conscience tried to nudge me once
more, telling me this was wrong
. Why now?
The man was a dead man, I was
just cleaning up the mess that my new boss had stirred up.  I attempted to
ignore that little voice I braced myself for the gun’s kickback.  When I
was as ready as I was ever going to be, I silently took one more breath and
evenly squeezed the trigger.

If the muffled click bang
that billowed out of the gun was what it was supposed to sound like when
suppressed, then I was happy that I had remembered to add the suppressor to my
mental image.  But unfortunately, that was all I was able to be happy
about; the bullet that had been speeding its way to Alexis' skull came within
three feet of its target and stopped in midair, like a fly caught in a spider’s
web.  Confused, I repositioned my sights and pulled the trigger
again.  Or rather, I tried to, but I quickly found that I was unable to
move any part of my body, not even squeeze the trigger.  Panic lanced down
my spine as I tried to force my body into action. When I was unable to follow
my mind’s directions my fear soared to new heights.

What is going on?
 
I forced my eyes to look down the barrel’s sight and I saw Alexis turn around
and look straight at the hole in his wall.  Even though I couldn’t see his
mouth I could tell by his eyes that a small but wan smile was spreading across
his lips.  Remembering the face from the picture I was unable to reconcile
that face with the half face before me.  Instead of a joyous man all I
could see was an executioner.  Casually the well-built man stood up,
walked towards the suspended bullet, and plucked it right out of the air before
examining it.  From here I could tell that the front of it had crumpled as
if it slammed into something solid.  But the path had been through empty
air, there was nothing for it to slam into. 
What have I gotten myself
into?

Alexis dropped the bullet
to the ground and turned his attention to the hole that I had made.  He
was too far away to do anything more than look at it, but he closed the
distance easily enough.  I wasn’t able to see more than his finger trace
the edge of his side of the hole. 
What is he doing?
 
Is he
appraising my work?

But before I could really
wonder anymore, he quickly removed his finger.  Then, the room went dark
and I realized he was just like me.  He had sealed his side of the hole.
Naturally, my glasses that would have allowed me to see quite comfortably were
resting away from my eyes.  So I was forced to stand there in the darkness
and wait for my new executioner to fetch his axe.

As I was forced to stand
there in the dark hallway all I could do was think about the fact that I had just
tried to assassinate someone who was just like me.  Swallowing the
baseball sized lump in my throat I cursed my luck, especially when he opened
the door letting light pour into the hallway.  With his face cast all in
shadow, I couldn’t help but think that, rather than a man, he was an avenging
angel looming over me.  The illusion was thankfully shattered when the
light suddenly filled hallway, presumably with a simple flip of a switch.

When he eventually
leveled his gaze upon me he seemed to be measuring me, like a pig at
market.  The air of indifference that was radiating off of him was
unnerving.  After a subjective eternity of study the man leaned against
the doorframe and, shaking his head, spoke in an emotionless voice.  “Well
I will admit that you do have a fair amount of skill."  Pausing to
take a deep breath he crossed his arms in front of his chest as he went
on.  "But unfortunately for you, you weren’t as equally blessed with
intelligence.”

With a disgusted sigh he
stalked over, never taking his eyes away from me as if I would finish the
attempt if given the opportunity.  I tried to reply but my mouth was as
still as the rest of my body.  So I stood there and waited for this man to
pass judgment on me.  As I tried to stare at the man’s neck I couldn’t
suppress the feeling that this was going to end very badly for me. 
Strangely, I found myself thinking about how rare my particular talent was
“supposed” to be.  Before attending Dempsey's tournament I had never met
anyone else with my abilities and yet within the last twenty-four hours I had
discovered two.  Dempsey’s woman and this man were just like me.

Despite the serious
nature of my predicament, a part of me couldn’t help but examine the technical
side of the situation.
How did he manage to stop the bullet, and how did he
manage to so completely immobilize me?
  After all, he had been in a
different room with no line of sight to me, and from what I knew about our
gifts that was quite impossible, or it should have been.

Looming over me he spoke
softly, “What am I going to do with you?”  Alexis idly started scratching
the bottom of his chin with his right hand.  And he kept on scratching as
he stood there silently, pondering his own question.  He was obviously
aware of just how useful silence can be in inducing terror.  All I could
do was wait for him to come to a decision. Eventually he broke the silence with
a whisper, but in the utter silence of the room it may as well have been a
scream.  “I’m going to remove the restraints I’ve placed around your
mouth, but no more.  And I'm only doing that so you can answer me, do you
understand?”

I instantly felt pressure
evaporate from my jaw. 
How had I missed the pressure being
applied?  What did he do to me? 
After a few rapid blinks I
shifted my eyes up as far as I could and I recognized a growing look of
impatience thickening upon Alexis' face.  He was waiting for me to answer
him, and I was remaining silent, great.  I pushed past my shock quickly
offered my reply of assent.

With a nod he leaned
against the wall, positioning himself in order to place his face on the same
level as mine.  “As I said, you have talent kid.  But you lack
understanding to pair with that talent.”  A wry laugh escaped his mouth
before he shook his head and concluded his thought.  “Tonight, you were
like a child attempting to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro.”

I knew I was in trouble,
but I had no desire to put up with his taunting “What’s happening to me?” 
On its own, not a bad question given the circumstances, my problem was the
tone. Rather than acting meek—or even normal—I instead sounded a bit
belligerent and demanding.  

Knowing how much trouble
those words were going to cause my I tried to close my eyes, but like the rest
of me they were frozen. I clamped down on the words that were wanting to pour
out next.  Instead, I lifted my gaze so that Alexis' solemn stare didn’t
quite meet my own, while still allowing me to study his.  This was not an
easy thing to accomplish.

As the silence, not to
mention the tension in his face, began to build, I was worried that my big
mouth had finally secured my death.  But suddenly the tension in his face
simply disappeared.  And with a deep belly laugh Alexis began to twirl his
finger in front of my face, which only confused me.  Eventually he was
able to voice what he had been attempting to communicate through his hand
gesture.  “I’ve essentially wrapped you up in a cocoon.”

Emboldened by his answer,
I asked the next question, “How?”

Folding his arms across
his chest he offered me a friendly smile, but that was where the warmth
ended.  The tone let me know that while he may have been willing to
overlook the tone I had used earlier, the same wouldn’t be true again. 
“Your question just demonstrates the lack of understanding you have when it
comes to forging. Now forget any more questions you might have because I have
one for you."  While his voice was calm I could see the deadly
seriousness in his eyes. Without moving, he somehow managed to appear to be
looming over me again.  With the same emotionless voice he asked me his
question.  "Why did you even try to challenge me?”

“What are you talking
about?”

As I answered I could see
the shock in his eyes grow.  “Surely you must have…” but he was unable to
say anything else past the stutter in his voice.  Taking a long moment to
collect his thoughts and composure he was eventually able to ask his
question.  “Are you honestly trying to tell me that you had absolutely no
idea that I was a forger?”

Now I was the one to be
confused. “What does faking signatures have to do...?”

The shock and confusion
fell away from his face only to be replaced with a look of disgust.  In a
stern and commanding voice he asked, “You don’t know what a forger is, do you?”

 “I can honestly
tell you that I have no idea what you are talking about.” 

 “Then what on earth
brought you here, tonight?”

My throat tightened up
and not because of the constraints.  Truth be told I was honestly more
than a little embarrassed that I was about to admit to my target that I was
there with orders from a crime lord to assassinate him.  At the same time,
a part of me decided that the truth was my best option, so before I could stop
myself, I started to blurt it out.  “I was recently forced into this by
Bertrand Dempsey…”

He immediately stood
straight up so I was unable to see his face, but I could hear the snarl in his
voice, “You’re one of that man’s assassins?”  I could also hear the sheer
revulsion hanging thickly in his voice.

Again before I could
think, I opened my big mouth, “I guess so.”

The snarl and disgust
were still in his voice, but they were also mixed with cautious curiosity as he
asked, “What do you mean, you think so?”

“I was sort of forced
into this job, if you want to call it that.” 

The snarl had at least
been dropped from his voice as he inquired.  “Okay I’ll bite.  How
were you forced into this job?”

If I could have closed my
eyes I would have, but since I unable to, I launched into the pertinent part of
my tale.  “I was playing in his
hold’em
tournament
and I had had an extraordinary run of luck, which was taken by the dealers as a
sign of cheating.  And since this is Dempsey we’re talking about, they
told him their suspicions.  This in turn spurned him to order a break in
the game so he could have cameras installed in the final table.  It was
there that he caught me when I actually cheated in the final hand.”

“What are you
stupid?”  He asked, though by his tone I could tell it was a rhetorical
question, so I just bit my tongue.  “You actually tried to cheat Dempsey?”

“I wasn’t cheating him
personally.”  I offered as an explanation. But as those hollow words left
my mouth even I knew I had been fooling myself.  I could no longer believe
the lie that I had tried to sell myself.  I had been nothing more than a
fool.

With a look of
indifference the towering man said coldly, “That doesn’t matter, boy. 
Truth is truth, and the truth is you cheated the worst man possible.  But
what does intrigue me is that you’re still breathing, which I’m going to guess
leads into what you actually did?”

“I changed one of my
pocket cards into an ace.”

 “Giving yourself
a…”

“Full house, aces over
eights.” 

With a laugh he looked
down, “You willingly gave yourself a dead man’s hand?”

“What?”

“You do know what that
hand is right?” 

His question made me
nervous, what was so special about that hand? I cautiously answered the
question.  “No, I’ve never heard of it.  Should I?”

 “The reason that
hand is called a dead man’s hand, is Wild Bill Hickok was killed when he had
that hand.  You do know who that is, right?”

“Some famous dead cowboy
right.”  I said flippantly.

Shaking his head in
frustration Alexis muttered, “What do they teach these kids in school these
days?” Returning his attention to me, his words instantly grew clear as they
bored through me.  “While there is some debate over the actual composition
of the hand there is a consensus that it was at least two pair.  A pair of
black aces and eights."

I didn’t realize that
Alexis stopped until I looked up and saw his waiting face. 
Did he ask
me a question? 
I quickly muttered something about understanding what
he had said, it seemed like the most logical thing to be waiting on.  I
must have been right because, after another minute of silence, he started up
again. The man really knew how to wield his silences to full effect.

"Now as I've implied
only the fifth card is surrounded in mystery.  There are some who will
swear up and down it was some sort of queen, while others claim it was the nine
of diamonds.  But then again there are those who are convinced, or maybe
they would just rather believe, that the third card was another ace.  Now
it just so happens that aces over eights is the most widely known version of
the hand and, due to the strength of that hand that is most likely
scenario.  But either way, it’s considered an extremely unlucky hand to
have.”

The nine of diamonds, was
Alexis being serious with me?
  There was no way
he could have known what my starting hand had been.  But then...
Is
this all just some strange and bizarre coincidence?
  When my mind
finally pulled together all of the stray thoughts into one intelligible, or
mostly intelligible pot, laughter was on the verge bursting out of me like
water from a dam.  I fought to control myself as I had zero reason to
laugh.  It took me awhile, but I was eventually able to diffuse the
impending laughter, which is of course when I chose to open my mouth.
 “Well then I guess it was quite the apt hand to make for myself.” 
And with the one quip the wall I had built around the laughter crumbled and my
laughter filled the hallway.

There was no possible way
Alexis could have known why I was laughing, not when the reason eluded
me.  But I guess my laughter was just so infectious that he was compelled
to partake in the forced merriment.  But since he was able to reign it in
before I could I was forced to listen to more of his words.  “Alright,
you've had your laugh, now tell me what happened after you stole the
hand.” 

The command chilled me to
the core.  Remembering what I had woken up to was enough to knock the
laughter right out of me and place me back in that freezer.  I suppressed
the shiver that tried to run up my spine. I didn’t like the idea of admitting
my mistakes to Alexis, but what I disliked even more was the idea of showing
him my discomfort.  In the end I knew I had little choice, "There
isn’t much to tell really."

Why am I trying to annoy
my new executioner?  Have I learned nothing over the last day?
 
"He found out that I cheated but more importantly, at least to him, he
found out how I cheated.  So as I'm being led to my money, one of his
goons used a stun gun to render me unconscious.   And when I woke up,
I found that I was being held captive.”

Stroking the left side of
his chin Alexis calmly asked me to clarify his confusion.  “And just how
did Dempsey and his goons manage that?”

He obviously knew more
about our abilities than I did, he had to know how to hold someone like us
against our will.  Perhaps a part of me was getting tired of the
interrogation, because my next words were less respectful than I had intended
them to be.  “Well for starters I came to in a rather spacious and cold
freezer with a pair of IVs pumping saline and drugs into my veins.”

With him leaning there
against the wall and nodding I couldn’t help but think of those old cartoons,
specifically the one with the coyote and roadrunner.  I remembered enough
of them to know that the roadrunner always won their little skirmishes; next
time I needed to be the roadrunner, I was tired of being the coyote. 
After a moment, Alexis locked his gaze upon my eyes and said, “That’s a decent
starting point for him.  But you should still have been able to do some
forging.  Why didn’t you just forge some heat into the lining of your clothing?”